What Really Happened With the IRS’s ‘Lookout Lists’

The IRS’s release on Monday of an 83-page report attempting to explain its targeting of tea-party groups, coupled with Ways and Means Committee ranking member Sander Levin’s release of 14 “lookout lists” issued by the agency at various points between August 2010 and April of this year, have created an enormous amount of confusion about whether tea-party groups were in fact targeted, and, if so, whether progressive and liberal groups were targeted too.

The documents are revealing, but they have been misinterpreted by many reporters, who are using them to demonstrate that groups across the ideological spectrum were flagged by IRS screeners. That is not the case. Several outlets have reported that the terms “Occupy” and “Israel” appeared on lists. Having reviewed all the lists posted by Levin, I have yet to see those terms. (I welcome corrections.)

Advertisement

The treatment of progressive groups cannot be equated to that of tea-party groups. The term “progressive” was flagged in a general warning to agency screeners — one that remained on the list throughout the time in question — that the applications of progressive organizations may not merit 501(c)(3) designation, which prohibits groups from engaging in political activity. That warning, according to an IRS source familiar with the review process, did not prevent first-line screeners from recommending an application be approved.

The same lists, between August 2010 and February 2012, directed screeners by default to send tea-party applications to a special group for further review and for coordination with lawyers in Washington, D.C. “They are different,” says the agency source of the designations made for progressive and tea-party groups.

Several of the lookout lists also indicate that the terms used to flag tea-party groups evolved. Between February 2 and February 8 of 2012, the tea-party listing was changed from “organizations involved with the Tea Party movement applying for exemption under 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) status” to a general listing under “Current Political Issues” that included organizations “involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the constitution and bill of rights, social economic reform/movement.”

The Treasury Department inspector general’s report issued in mid-May took note of this change, which reportedly took place after the IRS’s former director of Exempt Organizations, Lois Lerner, had directed that any objectionable language be removed from the list, and without her approval: “The team of specialists [handling tea-party applications] subsequently changed the criteria in January 2012 without executive approval because they believed the . . . criteria were too broad.” This is puzzling, first because the BOLOs indicate that the change took place in February, and also because it appears to broaden rather than restrict the criteria.

According to the TIGTA report, another change to the list took place in May 2012. That change is reflected in the June 15, 2012, version of the list, which entirely sanitizes the way in which political issues are flagged, instructing screeners to send along for special processing applications from organizations with “indicators of significant amounts of political campaign intervention.” Nothing objectionable about that. The words “tea party” do not appear on any lookout list issued after May 2012.

But we know their applications continued to be — and, in some cases, continue to be — caught up in the IRS bureaucracy. Could this answer the question? A month after the “political issues” listing was sanitized, in July 2012, an entirely new group of cases was added to the list: organizations formed to “pay down the national debt.” IRS screeners were told to elevate them for further scrutiny to the same group processing tea-party cases, where, the chart indicates, they were being coordinated with the same set of lawyers in Washington, D.C. Those groups remained on the IRS’s lookout list until IRS acting commissioner Werfel recently issued agency-wide orders to do away with such lists entirely. (On the most recent list released by Representative Levin, dated April 19, 2013, screeners are told to flag these organizations.)

Whether groups devoted to paying down the debt served as a proxy for tea-party cases is unclear. What is clear is that, if anything, the lookout lists released on Monday, if anything, substantiate the claims of tea-party groups that they were subject to unequal treatment by the IRS, and that until at least May 2012 their applications for tax-exemption were treated differently from those of their political opponents.

Most Popular

In his Lawfare critique of one of my several columns about the purported obstruction case against President Trump, Gabriel Schoenfeld loses me — as I suspect he will lose others — when he says of himself, “I do not think I am Trump-deranged.” Gabe graciously expresses fondness for me, and the feeling is ...
Read More

Are children innocents or are they leaders?
Are teenagers fully autonomous decision-makers, or are they lumps of mental clay, still being molded by unfolding brain development?
The Left seems to have a particularly hard time deciding these days. Take, for example, the high-school students from Parkland, ...
Read More

We live in a society in which gratuitous violence is the trademark of video games, movies, and popular music. Kill this, shoot that in repugnant detail becomes a race to the visual and spoken bottom.
We have gone from Sam Peckinpah’s realistic portrayal of violent death to a gory ritual of metal ripping ...
Read More

Mitt’s back. The former governor of Massachusetts and occasional native son of Michigan has a new persona: Mr. Utah. He’s going to bring Utah conservatism to the whole Republican party and to the country at large. Wholesome, efficient, industrious, faithful. “Utah has a lot to teach the politicians in ...
Read More

The horrifying school massacre in Parkland, Fla., has prompted another national debate about guns. Unfortunately, it seems that these conversations are never terribly constructive — they are too often dominated by screeching extremists on both sides of the aisle and armchair pundits who offer sweeping opinions ...
Read More

Howard Finkelstein, the Broward County public defender whose office is representing Nikolas Cruz, the suspect in the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., puts it bluntly:
This kid exhibited every single known red flag, from killing animals to having a cache of weapons to disruptive behavior to saying he wanted to be ...
Read More

American government is supposed to look and sound like George Washington. What it actually looks and sounds like is Henry Hill from Goodfellas: bad suit, hand out, intoning the eternal mantra: “F*** you, pay me.”
American government mostly works by interposition, standing between us, the free people at ...
Read More

To understand the American gun-control debate, you have to understand the fundamentally different starting positions of the two sides. Among conservatives, there is the broad belief that the right to own a weapon for self-defense is every bit as inherent and unalienable as the right to speak freely or practice ...
Read More

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) first infantilizes its audience, then banalizes it, and, finally, controls it through marketing.
This commercial strategy, geared toward adolescents of all ages, resembles the Democratic party’s political manipulation of black Americans, targeting that audience through its ...
Read More